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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/24472570">Life's a Bitch Then You Get a Long Flashback</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lousy/pseuds/Lousy'>Lousy</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>John Dies at the End - David Wong</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Action, Canon-Typical Violence, Comfort Food, F/M, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Rats</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-05-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-05-31</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-04 02:20:19</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Teen And Up Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>3,925</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/24472570</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lousy/pseuds/Lousy</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>John and Dave play exterminator with some totally normal, non-hellspawn rats, leaving them worse for the wear. Once Amy pries the story out of Dave she needs to take care of him and make sure everything's fine.</p><p>Takes place between TBiFoS and WtHDIJR. Rated for language.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Amy Sullivan/David Wong</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>5</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>Life's a Bitch Then You Get a Long Flashback</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>“I think I ordered too much food.”</p><p>“I don’t know, you had a long night,” Amy said, on script. She didn’t even offer to help Dave with his fries this time.</p><p>He had his arm wrapped around Amy’s waist, holding her close in one of their favorite date spots— a booth at Denny’s— but had to let her go to start attacking his breakfast platter. Amy scooted in to press herself against his side and felt him begin to relax. She picked at her hash browns and found that, no, the car ride over to Denny’s hadn’t given her any more appetite than she’d had when Dave and John had burst into the RV covered in gore at 2 a.m. demanding she join them for an early breakfast.</p><p>Speaking of John, he had already finished his pancakes and had committed himself to making the syrup jar sing each song being piped into the Denny’s through speakers with the same audio quality as a child’s walkie-talkie set down thirty feet away. His eyes were glassy and his heart clearly wasn’t in it, but dammit if that syrup jar wasn’t having the best (and most lewd) performance of its career. </p><p>John’s eyes flicked up to meet Amy’s probing stare. He yawned, sending a whiff of cheap beer Amy’s way and went back to work. Unsatisfied with the debriefing, Amy turned to her boyfriend to maybe get a better explanation for what had happened that had them looking like they had gone to an infected papercut convention, but seeing that he had an arm propped against the table and buried in his hair, the other shoveling comfort food into his mouth, she picked at her food and waited.</p><p>It was a while before David released a great sigh, pushed his empty plate away, and slumped face-down on the table. “Fuck.”</p><p>“Feeling better?” asked Amy.</p><p>Dave grunted.</p><p>“That’s good, that’s good… now tell me what happened.”</p><p>He grunted again in a way that could loosely be interpreted as ‘no thank you, I’m trying to slip into a carbohydrate induced coma, please return later.’  </p><p>“If you don’t then John will tell me. Right John?”</p><p>Hearing his name, John looked up, startled. “Oh hell yes. If I get a few thousand more syrup jars we can do a mini theater production of the whole night and then end on a Limp Bizkit concert. Here, Dave, this one that’s been jizzing on me can be you, and the blue one can be the big possum, and—”</p><p>“Jesus, fine, just stop molesting the syrup.” Eyes hooded, Dave sat up and snaked an arm around Amy’s waist. “I’m not going through the boring stuff though, I’ll just start at the point where…”</p>
<hr/><p>I realized things were going to shit when my life started flashing before my eyes. That phrase has always seemed a little too poetic to have any truth to it, but when you think about it what other option is there? You can only ever remember what you’ve seen and if you were to draw a blank in those last moments it would be much less dramatic. Much less cruel.</p><p>To use a sports metaphor like an adjusted human, seeing my life made me feel like a spectator in the stands. It was so easy to see all of my missed opportunities and mistakes (chief on the list, answering John’s call to action today) and so easy to yell at myself for fucking everything up, but because I was seeing it all from this angle I knew there was nothing I could do. The solutions to all my problems came bubbling up in that last ‘oh shit’ moment along with all the things I loved that I suddenly had the insight to see I didn’t appreciate enough or protect well enough. It was crueler than any form of torture and that’s how I know the mega-flashback was invented by the same ass hole(s) that invented life. Life tries its hardest to bend you over and fuck your brains out every opportunity it gets, so why should the last part of it be any different?</p><p>Anyways, so there I was, my life flashing before my eyes and a rat’s ass between my teeth. Strictly speaking, it might not be qualifyable as a rat, but the skinless tail flicking around my lips and the claws scrabbling around deeper in my throat than I had ever hoped to find claws were enough for me to classify it as such. </p><p>Now you might be thinking, David why don’t you just pull the rat-adjacent creature out of your throat with your hands which you have yet to address, you idiot? And to that I say, great point, I should explain that my arms and the rest of my body were incapacitated by a carpet of the throat rat’s chittering siblings, all running everywhere with their sightless faces and various horrifying mutations. </p><p>I had just about gotten to the point in my custom-made-mega-flashback where John pointed a sub-basement door with a look on his face that should have tipped me off to the fact that there would be hell rats or something similar behind it because what else could it be when the ghetto blaster kicked on. The sweet, beautiful sounds of Insane Clown Posse ripped through the room, sending the rats into a squealing frenzy but giving me the chance to free my arms and get a hold of mouth-rat. My mouth had already been stretched wide, but I crammed a few fingers in there and dug into the rat’s sides anyways. I pulled. And pulled and pulled. My vision was going spotty and I could tell my limbs were about to go limp, but I followed through and yanked the fucker out of my mouth, his claws turning my throat to ribbons the whole way. Once I had him in my hand I brained him against the concrete for his trouble. </p><p>Gasping for breath, I hauled myself to my feet, swinging blindly at the air when I felt beating wings close to my face. I grabbed where my flashlight was hanging from my belt and tried to locate the boombox. My vision was swimming, it looked like a sea of rats wherever I turned the light, they were coating the walls, dragging their fat bodies over the ground, clustering on the ceiling, and piling on the boombox. </p><p>Not giving myself the time to get as much musty dungeon air to my brain as it wanted, I kicked my way through the squirming darkness and valiantly stubbed my toe on the ones larger than a basketball. I ripped the boombox out of the tide and sent rats pouring off its surface as I shook. By the time I noticed one running up the length of my arm it had dodged my punch and crawled into my hair to get itself tangled. I thrashed, but it was stuck tight and just flopped around, smashing into my head and pulling my hair. It bit me when I reached a hand up and grabbed it but that didn’t stop me from ripping it off my head, taking some of my hair with it. I chunked the rat into the darkness, immediately spinning with the ghetto blaster to carve a circle around myself. The little servo motor over the ‘ON’ button was going crazy.</p><p>“JOHN! JOHN WHERE ARE YOU?”</p><p>I heard a response over the Posse but it took several more for me to recognize that it was coming from where we had found the queen rat-thing ready to receive us as sacrifices. Between us was the hill of meticulously molded and packed together rat shit I had recently rolled down, so I started to climb backwards while swinging the boombox around to cover my sides. As I gained height, I was able to spot the hatch on the ceiling across the room. I could also see the rats closing ranks, those blessed with four or more legs hurrying forwards and the big ones missing a few by design dragging their bellies across concrete. </p><p>I hit my head on something hard. A rat lunged forward and latched onto my ankle at the opportunity, nearly sending me off balance and down the other side of the hill. I whipped it off and stumbled backwards, just barely staying upright as rat turds skidded out from under my heels.</p><p>I arrived at the bottom with a crunch. Making a conscious effort not to look down, I spotted John a few feet away, struggling to get his flamethrower going while also beating off an unrelenting pack of rats. I cleared the distance between us and started punching rats off him with my boombox hand. They fell, writhing out his jeans and shirt holding prizes of flesh in their mouths and disappearing into the total darkness below the beams of our flashlights.</p><p>John swiped his flamethrower at me, missing my temple by an inch. “Oh, Dave it’s you! I thought you were a rat that mutated to infiltrate the ranks of humans.”</p><p>“Do you think I could pull that off? At this point I’m thinking living down here among the rats might be a better plan than trying to fight them.”</p><p>“It’s not that bad,” John said, balancing on one foot to kick at a lump shimmying up his pant leg, “we really only have to kill the one big one and then all the minions will poof out of existence or have a change of heart to become good, honest pizza rats in NYC or something.”</p><p>“… That sounds like bullshit.”</p><p>“It’s sound video game logic, you’ll see.”</p><p>Leaving me to address the rats swarming over shit hill, John waded through rat turds, rats, and bones of varying, non-rat sizes towards the lump of fur that was unmistakably the loving mother of all of these cuties I had been ripping out of my throat and clothes. Seeing him approach, the swarm squealed and tried to rush me, but only a brave few were able to slip by my aggressive ghetto blaster- flashlight defense, most of the width of the basement being taken up by shit.</p><p>I didn’t hear the flamethrower click on, but it was hard to miss the burst of light behind me and the screech of a thousand eldrich monsters that followed immediately after. The boombox fell to my feet, the flashlight to my thigh as I clamped my hands over my ears like an idiot who actually thought that would do anything to help.</p><p>Rats surged past me to help their brood mother become not on fire, rubbing their oily fur against my legs and completely passing up on my delicious if slightly used ankle meat. The shrieking didn’t stop. I only took my hands off my ears when John tugged one away and pointed past the hill. The flamethrower was still going as we hauled ass and produced an odor one could replicate by first drowning their local petstore for a week and then lighting it on fire. The stench was the cherry on top to the visual terror of flailing mutant rats as far as the eye could see and the auditory rape of a big rat on fire and not liking it.</p><p>Past the hill, I could tell the darkness on either side of John’s flame was writhing and in some cases fluttering, but I focused on staying a safe distance from the pyromaniac with a flamethrower while not falling too far behind his path of destruction. Flaming rats streaked past, one colliding with my face, but like the true professional I was not, I didn’t stop.</p><p>I nearly ran into John’s back when he reached the ladder and started up and nearly pulled his shoes off trying to climb out as quickly as possible. The flamethrower was still going when I hefted my ass out of the hatch and John turned it to the hole as soon as I was clear.</p><p>“You’ve been flamin’ hot vetoed!” he shouted, scorching a rat with six legs and a snapping mouth at the end of its tail when it tried to clamber up the ladder.</p><p>I didn’t need to ask to know John’s plan started and ended with the flamethrower, so I positioned myself to flip down the hatch the second he remembered lighter fluid was a finite resource. It didn’t take long. Something big thumped against the wood as soon as I pushed the hatch closed. I kept my hands on it until I couldn’t feel anything and slowly lifted off.</p><p>“John, can you help me move that filing cabinet?”</p><p>“I dunno if a nest of horrifically mutated possums can be classified as a code butt-plug. We should see this through.”</p><p>“Hm. Y’know I was thinking of them as rats.”</p><p>“What? No way. Didn’t you see their teeth?” He mimed.</p><p>“Yeah I guess, but—”</p><p>Something bumped the hatch, sending it up a few inches. I flung myself over to press it down with all my weight, crushing the tip of a leathery wing in the seam.</p><p>“See, that wouldn’t have happened if there had been a filing cabinet on top of this hatch.”</p><p>“But if there was a filing cabinet on the hatch we wouldn’t have the <em>once in a lifetime opportunity</em> to set fire to a satanic sub-basement.”</p><p>“Fuck that, you’ll probably get the chance next week. Hopefully when I’m not around.”</p><p>“Look. Dave. I think you know as well as I do that we can’t leave that alone. “</p><p>“Leave what alone, I’m not sure what you’re talking about. All I see is a hatch that needs a filing cabinet.”</p><p>
  <em>TUMP</em>
</p><p>“Okay, two filing cabinets.”</p><p>“How’s this; we move a cabinet on top of the hatch—”</p><p>“Loving this so far.”</p><p>“— go get a twelve pack, a shit ton of matches, and a healthy amount of lighter fluid—”</p><p>“You’re losing me.”</p><p>“— and light those fuckers up. It’ll be like ice fishing.”</p><p>I sighed and laid my head on the hatch.</p>
<hr/><p>“And that’s how we spent four hours dropping matches into a dirty hole. The end.” In telling the story David had melted out onto the table, all of his wounds having been verbally reminded that they should be hurting.</p><p>“I… can see why you wanted to take a shower so badly. I’m glad to hear my boombox servo worked, though!”</p><p>“Yeah, it finally did something other than wake me up from a kickass dream and then went into that sweet, ratty night.”</p><p>Amy frowned.</p><p>“Sorry, I’m just tired. It really did save my life.”</p><p>“So I need to make another one?”</p><p>“Uh, I guess. I still have the heartrate monitor though, so that doesn’t need to be replaced.”</p><p>The table fell into a silence, John fidgeting with his army of syrup bottles. Amy coughed.</p><p>“We should get home.”</p><p>The group piled into the Jeep and made the short trip to John’s house. Dave waited until John had stumbled inside to twist around and back out of the driveway. Although he tried to hide it, Amy noticed him jump when he turned. She looked to find what he might have seen. The darkness past the house lights looked thick.</p><p>“Everything’s fine.” He squeezed her hand.</p><p>When they arrived back at the RV Dave took another shower and emerged smelling a lot less smoky. He pulled on a pair of boxers and flopped face down next to where Amy was reading in bed, throwing an arm over her legs. Amy set her book down to get a better look at him.</p><p>She could see the bald spot on Dave’s head where the rat had gotten tangled, but there was no obvious sign of a bite. His back looked only mildly scraped, but his arms and lower legs had been scratched and bitten to hell. His ankles looked like something you would pull out of the garbage disposal. Amy found she couldn’t look at them for long.</p><p>Amy lifted Dave’s arm and slipped out from under it before placing it gently back on the bed. Poking around in the bathroom showed the first aid kit unmoved and almost assuredly untouched from when Amy had first bought it. Dave had turned his head to side and followed her reappearance from the bathroom with glassy eyes. He exhaled softly when she crawled onto the bed and sat on his butt, facing his head.</p><p>“I swear to God, if you fart I will never have sex with you again.”</p><p>She took his nearly comatose stillness as an affirmative and set the first aid kit on his back, flipping the latches open and pulling out a bottle of isoprophic alcohol and a stack of cotton pads. She started by carding her fingers through his hair, massaging his scalp while looking for any bites. When she found one Amy soaked a pad with alcohol and pressed it to the wound. Dave started, nearly throwing her off.</p><p>“Jesus fuck! Warn me please!”</p><p>“Sorry! I just don’t want some disease turning you into the next rodent brood mother.” Amy withdrew the pad to find it grimy and the wound only slightly cleaner.</p><p>“I’m not gonna turn into a giant rat mom. I’ll be a giant rat <em>dad</em> and I’ll name all of my children after the members of Limp Bizkit with alternate spellings.”</p><p>“There can’t be enough of them for that.”</p><p>“You’d be surprised.”</p><p>“Well, as your giant rat girlfriend I think you should name them alphanumerically so you’ll never run out of names, which, in my opinion, would be the limiting factor to the number of rat babies you could have. And also so you can keep a count of how many children you have. For child support purposes of course.” She folded the pad and wet one side of it. “Coming back in.”</p><p>Dave hissed and gripped the sheets as she dabbed the pad against the bite. They talked softly as she worked her way down his body and then back up his front. She didn’t bother with bandages on most of the scratches as she feared there would be a national shortage if she did. Missing chunks got neosporin and a bandaid and occasionally bits of fabric tweezed out of them. When only his ankles were left, Dave sat up and wrapped them himself to adequately compress their new, ground meat consistency. By this point in the process he had stopped twitching and yelping so much, but Amy could see him nearly biting a hole through his lip regardless.</p><p>She returned the kit to the bathroom and when she got back found Dave under the covers and holding them up for her to climb under to where her orthopedic pillow was waiting. She got in and wriggled so her back met his stomach as he wriggled forward. He dropped the covers and tucked his arm over her side and against her chest, his bare stomach pressing comfortably into her back. The last thing she remembered was kissing his arm before drifting off.</p><p>Amy’s back woke her up an hour later. She rolled over slowly and was shifting towards David when she heard it. Amy froze, giving the noise a chance to be a figment of her imagination and—</p><p>It happened again, around the back of the trailer. It sounded like when David had tried to make scrambled eggs and kept scraping the fork at the bottom of the pan when he lost the eggs and they would sizzle and get crispy on the sides. Amy carefully lifted Dave’s arm off herself and bunched her covers into the spot she had vacated. On her way out she grabbed the flashlight that cast light Batman-symbol style in the shape of a cross as well as the Scooby-Doo glasses and put on the pair of flipflops that lived by the door. </p><p>She exited quietly and eased down the three steps to ground level, running her stump along the side of the trailer as she made her way to the back by a narrow beam of Jesus motif light. She watched the uneven ground in front of her feet carefully, taking small, low steps to keep her balance and rounding the corner slowly when she go to it. Amy lifted the beam to illuminate the back side of the RV and automatically tried to clap a hand over her mouth at what she saw, getting only air and her stump pressed against her chin.</p><p>It was unmistakably one of the rat-possum creatures Dave had spent the evening cooking. She only caught a glimpse of its single, red eye and the leathery plating on its back before it darted under the trailer. They were both wrong, Amy thought in a daze, it looked like an armadillo if anything.</p><p>She put some space between her and the trailer and crept towards where she had spotted it, a place marked by an obvious attempt to gnaw through the cheap sheet metal. She squatted and swept the light between the belly of the RV and the ground. When the light passed over the armadillo it made the sizzling egg sound and scurried off, but Amy chased it with the light, trying her best to keep her footing in slapping flipflops while crouching to see under the trailer.</p><p>She took the corner fast and caught the mutant at the front where it had been about to make a break for the street. It scuttled back and forth to try and avoid crossing the criss crossing cross light with little success. </p><p>Amy was debating if she should try to flush it out when the creature streaked past her and made for a stand of trees. Not knowing what else to do, she chased after it, her light cutting swathes into the darkness although she tried to keep it trained on the animal (?).</p><p>
  <em>TUNK</em>
</p><p>It was still.</p><p>As a principle, Amy tried to see the beauty in everything— even and especially when it was hard as was the case with Dave’s RV, the talking Christmas tree Dave kept in the RV, and Dave’s pickled souvenirs (also in the RV). She also believed that cursing was a sin she was not to indulge in. That said, Amy couldn’t deny that this grotesque rodent-adjacent thing was almost certainly the ugliest fucking thing on God’s green Earth. It also appeared to be smoking. Not smoking like a new father post-waiting-in-a-side-room-while-his-wife-shit-out-a-child smoking, but smoking in the way barbecue does. The analogy was further helped by the sizzling sound it continued to emit while under the dim, LED symbol of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ, amen. The creature’s collision with the tree had knocked it unconscious, but she kept her light on it in case it did something threatening.</p><p>It exploded into chunks, threateningly. Amy couldn’t stop herself from yelping when a warm, leathery scale slapped her cheek. After frantically pawing the gore off her face, she was quick to start swinging the flashlight around in case spontaneous explosion was just a temporary and nonlethal hobby of bitch-ass fuck-ugly creatures from hell. Seeing a foot and a head seven feet apart she decided this was unlikely and headed in.</p><p>She shuffled her shoes off at the door and padded to the bed. Seeing it hit Amy with a wave of exhaustion and curling up next to Dave compounded it. She held him gently around the middle and nestled her head under his chin. He blinked awake and pressed his nose into her hair.</p><p>“You good?”</p><p>She held him tighter. “Everything’s fine.”</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>If you know where I got the rats from, please let me know. I need to know other people have read that.</p></blockquote></div></div>
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